This is a static website generator, that includes support for a blog, with vanity urls, keyword tags, RSS, sitemap.xml.
I reimplemented site-gen-rust which I wrote in Rust to learn Rust, in OCaml to learn OCaml (which is a rewrite from site-gen originally written in Swift). Then I rewrote site-gen-ocaml in C, as site-gen-c... You get the idea.
Note, the Rust, OCaml and C versions just went further, they're on par feature wise. The site-gen in Swift version is out of date, I was still figuring out what this thing should be and how it should work.
it takes a .settings.json of this format...
{
"workdir": "/Users/name/Documents/Code/website/public",
"webroot": "https://website.org",
"template": "./template/template.html",
"templateindex": "./template/template-index.html",
"contenttag": "{{%%content%%}}",
"titletag": "{{%%title%%}}",
"descriptiontag" : "{{%%description%%}}",
"keywordstag": "{{%%keywords%%}}"
}
The site generator will then
- walk recursively the
workdirlooking for.md(markdown) files, - converts them to HTML
- insert them in
template - replacing the
contenttagwith the HTML - update
descriptiontagwith the contents of<x-desc>(custom valid HTML5 tag in the markdown) - same with the
keywordstagwith the contents of<x-tags>(hidden) - same with the
titletagwith the contents of<x-title> - it will do the same with the templateindex if the markdown contains (as an indicator of being the index)
This custom HTML5 tag gymnastic is to avoid having metadata json files around, or breaking the valid markdown format (like Hugo does). In retrospect, I have mixed feelings about it.
NOTE: the content will be placed in situe. So if the website places a markdown in /folder it will be /folder/index.html so that you're in control of the whole website structure and vanity urls.
The blogging system works pretty much the same, except I use <x-blog-title> instead of <x-title> to tell the generator that this is a blog post.
Blog posts will automatically have a blog class on the <body> to style the blog differently, as needed.
Additionally we parse sub for the RSS pubDate and to be sorted on the index page.
It will be included in the RSS and linked from the homepage. Note that this last part is pretty much custom to suit my own needs, but could be abstracted out further.
A c2x compiler e.g. recent clang. I used Homebrew's clang 17.0.6 on macOS M2 arm64. clangd optional but good for dev and lldb for debugging.
make
make release
For fun, I ran some stats. This compares the different builds. Note that both were written pretty naively, I was new to Rust and I am new to OCaml. So, take those with a grain of salt. However the implementation logic is very linear and very similar...
The C version could be much faster, I'm doing a ton of allocations that aren't strictly needed for the sake of getting it done. To be optimised.
hyperfine --warmup 5 ./sitegen # ran for approx 400-600 iterations.
Time (mean ± σ): 3.0 ms ± 0.2 ms [User: 1.1 ms, System: 1.8 ms]
Time (mean ± σ): 4.3 ms ± 0.2 ms [User: 2.1 ms, System: 2.0 ms]
Time (mean ± σ): 6.4 ms ± 0.2 ms [User: 3.5 ms, System: 2.8 ms]
Time (mean ± σ): 21.2 ms ± 0.2 ms [User: 17.6 ms, System: 3.3 ms]